mynickers

Hello all,

I am getting my first mac soon, well hopefully, I am trying to 'rescue' one from a friends company for a minimal cost, probably in some denomination of beer. It's a G4 tower, bought in 1999 and used for office use for about 2 years, and then stashed in a store room collecting dust for another couple. He is not sure of the spec yet as there are a few to be got rid of, so I am not sure what speed the G4 is, and I am not too bothered, it will be much quicker than my present PC

He thinks it has 512mb of ram, and he is pretty sure he can make that a GIG, which will be great, although 512 will probably be fine. Basically I think he is going to try and get me the best one there and put as many bits on as possible, as he is responsible for it all!

So it looks like I should have a quite nice spec'd mac to play with, the only thing that might need replacing is the HD, he thinks it's either 20 or 40 gigs, and possibly a slow one.

I wanted to ask if I can install PC IDE hard-drives onto a mac? (I've got several 7200rpm drives).

If not, would I be able to get one of those external hard-drive enclosure (firewire or USB2) and use it as an external hard drive?

Power Junkie

iTrader: (1)

Mac's run SCSI drives so you wont be able to use the IDE's internal. you should be able to run them via firewire I think..

AllanB

Yep not a problem. ATA drives will drop stright in, the carriers are in place and just fit into place. RAM will likely be PC100 or PC133 and is dead cheap. Doesn't need to go in matched pairs either.


AllanB

class_A

Not for about 8 years

ScoobyDoo555

- got ATA drives in mine

Dan

Markus

Not anymore. I *think* since the first beige G3's all Macs have used IDE hard drives. Bloody good move in my opinion, SCSI is nice, but these days, getting a replacement drive is a pain.

My G4 sitting here has a nice 120GB Maxtor PC drive in it, so I can confirm with 100 percent certainty that they can use PC drives.